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As Italy’s electoral campaign heads into the final stretch, polls show that the vote is likely to produce a hung parliament, as a new electoral law and millions of undecided voters combine to make this one of the country’s most unpredictable votes in years.WSJ.com: What’s News Europe

You’ve probably heard of The DAO and you’ve certainly heard of the ICO. Now say hello to the DAICO, an “innovative fundraising model” that aims to combine the best of both frameworks. The Abyss Platform is the first project to utilize this hybrid organizational structure, which has been credited as the brainchild of Vitalik Buterin. There’s just one problem with The DAO, the ICO and the mutant DAICO it’s spawned – the public couldn’t give a damn about key tenets such as voting rights and community governance. All they want is cheap tokens they can flip for a quick profit.

Live and Let DAICO

The DAO (decentralized autonomous organization) was the first major project to be launched on the Ethereum blockchain, complete with a novel governance structure that replaced a board of directors with a community-run model. It didn’t end well. A vulnerability in the code saw one third of the ether committed to the project stolen and The DAO collapsed. As prominent crypto critic and agent provocateur Preston Byrne explains:

The original DAO could pass resolutions with a simple majority drawn from quorum of 20% (meaning as little as 10% +1 of the investors could bind the remaining 90%). No resolution ever passed because none of the tokenholders actually cared enough about what the DAO was doing in order to participate. Their primary motivation was to sit on their hands and wait for their investment to pay off.

Byrne may be a perennial bitcoin bear, but as a practising English solicitor, he knows more than most when it comes to the sort of legal matters that DAOs and DAICOs were meant to solve. Take a look at many of this year’s ICOs and you’ll find, somewhere in their roadmap, talk of token holders being empowered to vote on key protocol changes including platform developments and new features. It all sounds very progressive and democratic, but the trouble is even the loyalest of community members don’t care enough to want to micromanage decisions using the power invested in them by tokens. The real reason why ICOs are so eager to assign voting rights to their investors is to add legitimacy to their claim that the token is a utility and not a security.

Good Intentions Lost in the Abyss

The Abyss “merges some of the benefits of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs), aimed at upgrading and making the initial ICO concept more transparent and secure”. It allows “token holders to control the fund withdrawal limit, also providing an option to vote for refund of the remaining contributed money in case the team fails to implement the project, with Oracles (appointed industry leaders) acting as arbitrators.” The idea is plucked from a concept Vitalik Buterin mooted a few weeks back.

In his scathing critique of the DAICO, Preston Byrne writes: “I feel like I’m taking crazy pills here, because the SEC literally wrote a report about the original DAO scheme, likened it to a security, and cited as authority for this proposition not one but TWO cases relating to an infamous 1970s pyramid scheme that landed its promoter in federal prison for nearly a decade.”

He finishes: “A DAICO is nothing more than a new acronym for the same old bad ideas. The broken DAO concept, in particular, requires extensive rethinking and movement onto private/permissioned blockchains in order to shed its pyramid scheme-like qualities and serve a useful function. On account of which I am completely amazed that anyone would want to combine the DAO and ICO concepts under any circumstances.”

Original thinking deserves a chance to flourish, and blockchain governance – for all its pitfalls – may yet find a way to work. It probably won’t arrive in the form of the DAICO though or any of the other “revolutionary” governance models being used to float the current crop of crowdsales. Good ideas will ultimately prevail, while the ones deemed too wacky and unworkable will return to the abyss that spawned them.

Do you think blockchain democracy and token-based voting is a viable concept, or is it destined to fail? Let us know in the comments section below.

A New Jersey man who detonated a pressure cooker bomb in New York City’s Chelsea neighborhood in 2016 will spend the rest of his life in prison. Ahmad Khan Rahimi, 30, received two life terms plus an additional 30 years at his sentencing in a New York City courtroom on…Newser

The market carnage that started in the U.S. rippled across Asia on Tuesday, leaving traders, investors and strategists befuddled as to how to cope with the sharp and sudden declines, particularly after such a long stretch of historically low volatility.WSJ.com: What’s News Asia

Just a week after scientists reported evidence that our species left Africa earlier than we thought, another discovery is suggesting the date might be pushed back further. Homo sapiens arose in Africa at least 300,000 years ago and left to colonize the globe. Scientists think there were several dispersals…Newser

When Satoshi Nakamoto designed bitcoin, his smartest trick wasn’t to cap the total supply at 21 million coins – it was to make each coin divisible to eight decimal places. At the time, as now, the smallest unit of bitcoin was worth so little as to be inexpressible in fiat terms. But bitcoin’s creator had the foresight to recognize that if his fledgling cryptocurrency succeeded, there was a good chance that 1 BTC would eventually be worth quite a lot. And when that happened, one satoshi (a moniker which the smallest unit of bitcoin had yet to acquire) would also be worth something.

Bitcoin is Big But Small, Scarce Yet Plentiful

The beauty of bitcoin is that it can be simultaneously big yet small. You can buy a car for 2 BTC or an altcoin for 60 sats (satoshis). With the change left over from the former, you could load up on a bunch of the latter. Bitcoin’s divisibility, coupled with its ability to be expressed as both something expensive and something cheap, makes it the world’s most versatile cryptocurrency.

Today you can purchase 100 sats for a cent. If 1 BTC were ever to reach $ 1 million, a satoshi would achieve parity with a U.S. cent. But that doesn’t need to happen for satoshis to attain utility. They already have a number of uses, even if altcoin traders are one of the few groups who currently refer to things as being priced in sats. Once Lightning Network gets up and running – or as bitcoin cash adoption continues to grow – there’s no reason why sats can’t become the de facto unit for referencing small purchases. If bitcoin maximalists have their way, one day there will be no U.S. dollar and everything will be denominated in BTC or satoshis.

Should the global monetary system ever collapse and hyperbitcoinization occur at scale, there will be more than enough bitcoins to go around. Not whole ones, admittedly, but enough satoshis for everyone to transact. To put this into perspective, the global GDP stands at $ 78 trillion while the total supply of satoshis stands at 2,100 trillion. A future in which everyone is transacting in sats may be improbable, but it is not infeasible.

A Drop of Ripple or a Sat of Bitcoin?

Bitcoin isn’t the only cryptocurrency that’s divisible into thousands or millions of decimal places. Iota and Neo aside, most altcoins do the same. Ripple, for example, goes to six decimal places, with the smallest unit known as a drop. It’s a cool name, even if the world is unlikely to require XRP by the millionth any time soon given that you can purchase a whole one for just over a dollar.

Should ripple ever “do a bitcoin” and become hugely valuable, there will be 1e+17, or 100,000,000,000,000,000.00 drops to go round, which is almost as many drops as there are in the world’s oceans. (Let’s overlook the fact that Ripple Labs is sitting on 55,000,000,000,000,000.00 of those drops.) The idea of $ 1 million bitcoin seems fanciful right now, though not as fanciful as the notion of $ 100 ripple.

Satoshis: The Best Cryptocurrency You’re Not Using

There’s nothing wrong with buying a cryptocurrency like ripple or iota because you like the name, or the pretty logo, or have a soft spot for its CEO. Be it for emotional, ideological, or profitable reasons, by all means load up on XRP, DOGE, and XVG. But don’t mistake the dollar price attached to these coins for a fair valuation of their worth. Anything you can buy with a ripple you can buy with 10,000 sats and anything you can buy with a dogecoin can be bought for 60 sats. Big and small, Bitcoin’s base units do it all.

Do you think satoshis will eventually be widely used for pricing small purchases? Let us know in the comments section below.

Images courtesy of Shutterstock, and Fox Broadscasting.

This is an Op-ed article. The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own. Bitcoin.com does not endorse nor support views, opinions or conclusions drawn in this post. Bitcoin.com is not responsible for or liable for any content, accuracy or quality within the Op-ed article. Readers should do their own due diligence before taking any actions related to the content. Bitcoin.com is not responsible, directly or indirectly, for any damage or loss caused or alleged to be caused by or in connection with the use of or reliance on any information in this Op-ed article.

A society of high-minded French purists have deemed another English-derived word unfit for their language. According to the Local , Commission d’enrichissement de la langue française has zeroed in on the use of “smartphone.” Known in English as the Enrichment Commission for the French Language, the group is affiliated with conservative…Newser

Kim Kardashian and Kanye West have been offered multi-million dollar deals to provide first photos of their new baby … and they have REJECTED all of them. Sources familiar with the offers tell TMZ, various websites and magazines started making…

Hollywood can forgive Tonya Harding if they want … but Johnny Weir says that’s NEVER gonna happen with him and the rest of the figure skating community. We spoke with Weir the day after Harding got a shout-out at the Golden Globes … and he…

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